Pixatel Partners With USAID to Transform Rural Education Through eLearning

Pixatel Systems, a social enterprise focused on addressing critical developmental challenges through its Citizen Empowerment Solutions (CES), announced that it has won a highly competitive USAID Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) grant to develop a cloud based eLearning Platform.

The Stage 1 DIV grant will support development of a technology platform to improve the quality of education with a focus on basic numeracy and literacy. The platform’s computer-assisted learning will cater to individual students by allowing them to learn according to their own ability and at their own pace. The platform will initially host Pixatel’s learning software that provides game-like educational applications to teach basic math skills. The program will establish baseline skills for each student, and let students advance through subsequent levels corresponding with advanced concepts.

“Major inequalities in education quality in developing countries are caused by a lack of innovative means to engage young children with content that incorporates the latest research in curriculum development,” said Richard Shapiro, Vice President of Education and Public Policy at Pixatel. “This project will address these concerns, with a highly cost-effective, cloud-based technology platform that will deliver educational content to students via tablet computers. We expect to deliver strong learning improvements with the goal of building a scalable platform that can support any educational subject in any country with high quality, culturally relevant content.”

The system also employs powerful backend data collection to track progress at the student level, and also aggregates data at the teacher, grade, or school level, allowing educators and policy makers to gain visibility into which content is most effective for specific groups of students. Pixatel seeks to achieve scale quickly through a model that provides developers strong financial incentives to create educational content, while enabling schools to receive the content at no or low cost.

“The key cost-effectiveness and scale potential of our solution lies in the ability to use a cloud platform and low cost tablets to deliver a wide range of software relevant to every subject, age, and learning ability,” said Dr. Jasmit Singh, Pixatel’s Chief Technology Officer. “Eventually,” he said, “our platform will host a variety of educational content across various subjects, languages and formats and provide metrics on the effectiveness of each solution. The dynamic nature of the platform will allow for a diverse set of content choices, development of shared standards, continual innovation in curricula, and ability to update to better content when it becomes available without operational switching costs.”

“DIV looks for cost-effective, evidence-based, and scalable development ideas that have the potential to dramatically improve global prosperity,” said Kristen Gendron at DIV. “We are excited to work with Pixatel as they test their eLearning platform in India.”

“We are looking forward to being a pilot site for Pixatel’s cloud-based learning platform,” said Mr. Parshottam Singh, Chairman of the National Public School in Tarn Taran, Punjab. “Pixatel’s innovative solution provides students interactive adaptive learning while giving teachers the ability to monitor impact of lesson plans. Both teachers and students are excited to be part of the upcoming deployment during the 2014 school year.”

Pixatel has previously deployed its applications in Nepal, Philippines, Indonesia, India, and Latin America in partnership with private educational institutions, governments, and enterprises. Pixatel’s worldPad EDU platform delivers low cost learning devices, integrated curricula, and services, like an educational application store, to make quality education universally accessible. Pixatel’s Cloud Based Learning Platform will be offered as an independent solution and also part of the worldPad EDU platform.

About Pixatel

Pixatel is the leading provider of Citizen Empowerment Solutions, a set of services focused on solving critical development challenges. Pixatel imagines a world where everyone has access to literacy and utilizes e-Learning systems that enable universal access to knowledge, develop responsible citizenship, and foster a lifelong love for learning. Pixatel works with governments, enterprises, and content publishers around the world to develop and launch innovative services to address key strategic challenges.

About Development Innovation Ventures

USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) is an investment platform that finds, tests, and scales new solutions to development challenges around the world. Through a year-round open competition, DIV seeks ideas that demonstrate cost-effectiveness relative to traditional approaches, that gather rigorous evidence of their intervention’s impacts, and that have the potential to scale through the public or private sector without long-term DIV support.